JoAnna Novak, DOMESTIREXIA

 

I couldn’t believe this
cardinal hopping
red fluff
in the yard
and more, green
all day long, the spread
of history, goodness,
the morning
made me hungry,
unstable, and talky (“Abundance”)

I’m very excited to see a copy of American writer, editor and publisher JoAnna Novak’s latest poetry collection DOMESTIREXIA (Soft Skull Press, 2024), following Noirmania (Inside the Castle, 2018), Abeyance, North America (New York/Kingston NY: After Hours Editions, 2020) [see my review of such here] and New Life (New York NY: Black Lawrence Press, 2021) [see my review of such here]. “Seducing the reader with its unexpected entanglement of ‘domestic’ and ‘anorexia,’” the back cover writes, “JoAnna Novak’s DOMESTIREXIA is a collection of poems that brings a behind-closed-doors sensuality to scenes of home life. Populated by unknowable characters wrestling with seeming abundance, DOMESTIREXIA plumbs the nature of longing and misbehavior, reimagining the home as a space for estrangement rather than intimacy.” The collection is set in five numbered sections, including a fourth, which is a reworked version of her above/ground press chapbook, Knife with Oral Greed (2021) [a further chapbook is forthcoming, I should mention]. Novak’s poems, as I’ve encountered, offer depictions of situations, her attentive eye and deep perspective on what would otherwise be familiar. From pregnancy to geography, Novak writes on motherhood and domestic life through dark twists, distances and shadows, language honed bone-sharp. “with pleasure or / praise,” she writes as part of the second sequence-section, “Abundance,” “we deserve / leeks / and little gems / honorable / invitation meet / me / in the pantry [.]” As part of an interview via Touch the Donkey, she spoke of the manuscript, then still in-progress:

I get tired of my default modes of expression, and I try to do something different—in the case of these poems, work with characters, create a façade of narrative logic. I think of narrative as having false comforts, especially as of late, because of the ongoingness of the pandemic. (And these poems were very much a product of the early days of quarantine.) I bristle when I hear people say, “When COVID is over” or the like. This idea that there will be a resounding “The End” seems false in this context. This resonates with my own sense of the world, I suppose, tinged by neuroses or compulsions, where repetition upends the notion of causality. But also, in a vastly different context, my son—who is fifteen months old—doesn’t seem satisfied by “The End.” He points again at whatever we’re reading (Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?) as soon as I close the back cover.

Novak moves through the tensions of domestic as subject—the disappointments, the distractions, mundanities, degrees and difficulties—echoing the cultural depiction of domestic as some kind of punishment, while simultaneously attempting to allow the flowing possibilities and delights of such space for turning, becoming. As part of the poem “Highboy,” writing: “I love your sense. I love your stability. I love your advice. I love your father making furniture, joints joints vices files ferries roses and fathers, were I a man I’d be a father, shan’t I, shouldn’t I, someday: I know nothing, I am trying to learn. I am not a novena, prayerfully blank, embittered esposa, easily drunk, painting foxes, teeth in denial, on tall chests of drawers. Let me survive the hand-me-downs and sentiment, the flinch before savings. Do I look vegan? Slow-mo flamboyant? What can I do?” Coming at her subject from the side, her poems offer themselves as sharp ellipses, running blood across lines. She writes the tensions between the two poles, two sets of expectations, even from within her own narrator. “Be only a girl:,” she writes, as part of the poem “Nothing to Lose,” “What other rule is there?”